The Grand Canyon remains open to visitors despite pleas to close it.
Calls mounted Tuesday for the federal government to close Grand Canyon National Park after the popular tourist destination saw its first case of the coronavirus in a hospitality worker.
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Members of Congress and city, county and tribal officials have urged the federal government to approve a request from the park to close amid concerns that social distancing can’t be maintained.
“We understand that closing an iconic destination like the Grand Canyon is not an easy decision, but we implore you to do everything in your power to prioritize public health and not interfere with locally informed decisions to close parks where appropriate,” members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources wrote to the Interior Department.
So what’s the Interior Department doing? Counting the take? Watching Fox News? Stockpiling toilet paper?
The Navajo Nation also renewed a request for the park to close. Anyone headed to the park’s East Rim must drive through the tribe’s reservation, which has seen five deaths and nearly 150 coronavirus cases.
It’s smallpox blankets all over again.
The Park Service has been deciding whether to shut down individual sites on a park-by-park basis, in consultation with state and local health officials. Neither the Interior Department nor the Park Service immediately responded to requests Tuesday on the status of the Grand Canyon’s request.
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Several of the country’s most popular national parks have closed, including Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Glacier, Arches and Canyonlands. Some of those calls were made at the request of governors and health officials in those states.
In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey has listed parks, golf courses and other outdoor recreation areas as essential. A spokesman did not immediately return a message Tuesday asking whether the governor would support closing the Grand Canyon.
At first I was taken aback by the golf courses exception, but then I remembered that social distancing is pretty easy with golf, so maybe that’s not entirely absurd. Getting outside is good, and maybe golf courses can play a role there.
But the Grand Canyon is a place where people cluster at the viewpoints. Shut’er down.
Updating to add: yes the Grand Canyon is big, no that doesn’t mean you can allot an equal share of its total space to each visitor. As I said, people cluster at the viewpoints.
Comments
17 responses to “Big ditch open for business”
It depends on who’s golfing:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/social-distancing-culture/609019/
Not Bruce, I read that article this morning. Horrifying. I was a bit annoyed that the article seemed to be doing the both sides now thing, as if the people distancing, shaming, etc, were just being political, but overall, I found it terrifying that so many conservatives are openly flouting the guidelines. And I don’t think that is because the liberals are so mean; I think it’s because the conservatives choose to see it as a liberal issue; liberals choose to see it as a scientific issue.
In NZ we’ve closed golf courses (except for use of public walking paths where provided) and driving ranges.
Also, 62% of NZ’s know cases so far are people arriving from overseas (tourists or returning locals) before we closed our borders. 37% are directly linked to those travellers or a known contact of those travellers (mostly via cluster infections). 20% of the travellers were via the US. That’s the single largest group.
Grand Canyon N.P. is 1.2+ million acres, you’d think people could spread out some. But then again I invented social distancing decades ago, so this really isn’t an issue for me. :D
twiliter, you couldn’t have invented social distancing, I invented it! When I was six, and didn’t want kids on the playground to kick and hit me!
I always think I may have invented stuff, then I find out Shakespeare knew about (and wrote about) it already.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree with twiliter — there’s plenty of room, so spread out. Weren’t we just displeased that people weren’t allowed to walk in a field in the UK? It seems with a little effort they could hike around in a place as big as the Grand Canyon just as safely. Maybe we could borrow some of those UK drones to monitor the viewpoints.
Driving through a reservation isn’t going to give covid-19 to anyone if they don’t allow people to stop and get out.
You’re joking, right? You do realize that the Grand Canyon isn’t a big field people can spread all over?
Narrow winding trails on cliffs…
Well, one wrong step and people are kinda “spread all over” once they reach the bottom; though before that moment, catching a virus is going to be, however briefly, a little lower on their list of things to be worried about.
Yellowstone has lots of big fields, and it’s closed. The trouble is that all the people herd together at all the improved tourist areas with bathrooms and running water and snacks. 3400+ square miles, with only about 1 square mile of places for the less adventurous sightseers. I guess it’s good in a way, it keeps the litterbugs and vandals from ruining the more remote areas if the whole park is closed. I’m sure there’s plenty to see at the Grand Canyon too without being at the visitor centers or main trails, but it would be hard for them to close just those areas, without keeping people who aren’t familiar with the wilderness from doing unsafe things, or trashing the place.
The Ken Burns documentary about the National Parks is fantastic by the way, well worth the hours spent if you’re staying in for a while. ;)
twiliter: Problem solved then. As Bill Shakespeare was pretty-well spot on re everything he wrote about, all we need to do is to look up what he had to say about Covid-19. ;-)
iknklast:
The ‘Conservatives’ of Australia are largely spoken for by Quadrant magazine, which is a mouthpiece for the coal industry with respect to climate change and anthropogenic global warming: in their view it is all a hoax and a conspiracy, and climatology can be explained away as being all about greed: for scientific research grants.
Unsurprisingly, the same luminaries give priority to business-as-usual with respect to dealing with Covid-19.
Meanwhile, their hero Donald Trump has moved from over the last 2 weeks or so from outright denial to something like ‘this is serious; very, very serious; nobody knows better than me how serious… etc.’
Trump has moved because his reality has changed, with experts predicting up to 200,000 deaths in America. Covid-19 could sweep him into the garbage bin of history, just as surely as Moby Dick did for Captain Ahab. Meanwhile, his Australian acolytes are keeping very quiet, with their heads low. I suspect they are floundering around in hasty consultations about how best to execute a 180-degree political turn.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/one-dozen-dissenting-second-opinions/
Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind. King Lear.
Diseases desperate grown, By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all.
Hamlet.
Caliban: The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!
Thersites: The plague of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel beef-witted lord!
Thersites: Now, the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel in the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, blades full of imposthume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’th’palm, incurable bone-ache, and the riveted fee-simple of the better, and the like, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!
Trump’s farewell: Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.
‘tetter’ not ‘better’ in Thersites’s speech. A plague upon ignorant spell-checks!
Didn’t the Grand Canyon have some creationist signage put up a few years back?
JtD, they did. And creationist books in the bookstore, explaining how this incredibly large, deep and wide canyon was created by the Noachian flood.